Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>]

Dave Washburn wrote:
> While I agree that linguists don't generally accept Genesis, it doesn't say that the languages  
> resulting from the Babel confusion were "in any measurable way similar to one another."  
> The fact that people couldn't understand each other suggests just the opposite.  So even if 
> there was "a single parent language," there's nothing in the story to indicate that the 
> resulting confusion of languages produced anything resembling said parent language.
>
>   
I'm not so sure that there's nothing to indicate a resemblance. The 
language was "babbled" or "mixed up" (BLL), which generally means "mixed 
together", as in mixing flour with oil. The other key word in the story 
is "scatter" (PWC): the people's original motivation is to avoid 
scattering, and God responds by doing exactly what they feared. (They 
thought that "making a name" would prevent it, and this seems to have 
been exactly the wrong strategy.)
So the result is a scattering and mixing: people who were united are now 
separated, and their languages have become mutually unintelligible. But 
just as the people who are separated were once together, it seems 
logical that the language has been "mixed" and "scattered" out of its 
original elements.

You might argue that with only one language to begin with, there aren't 
different things to mix. But it seems to me that the author's experience 
was of different related languages, like Hebrew and Aramaic, which 
present the appearance of a mixture, from the perspective of the other 
side. (In other words, to  a Hebrew speaker, Aramaic seems like Hebrew 
mixed with something else.) And we do find Hebrew speakers claiming not 
to understand Aramaic, and vice versa. The languages are mutually 
unintelligible for some purposes (e.g. construction projects, where 
precise terminology is needed); but of course a Hebrew speaker can 
understand a lot of what the Aramaic speaker says.

None of this is to suggest that the account in Gen.11 is, or was ever 
meant to be, a factual history rather than a myth. I think we miss out 
on the real meaning when we make that mistake. The meaning of Gen.11:1-9 
is far from obvious, and invites interpretation. The implications of 
"making a name" and "scattering" are obscure. And the traditional 
reading of  (YR WMGDL WR)$W B$MYM is tendentious: it takes a formulaic 
terminology ("city-and-tower" as a hendiadys for a common architectural 
pattern; "head in the heavens" as a religious metaphor) and reads it as 
some kind of sinful "assault" on God, which the story never says at all. 
In fact, God's motivation here is quite obscure, and I think that's part 
of the writer's intention. The writer tried to use the partial mutual 
unintelligibility of the languages familiar to the audience as a 
metaphor for the partial mutual unintelligibility of each person to 
others--a situation whose origin indeed remains obscure.


Gabe Eisenstein